On Monday, the U.S attorney’s office for the Middle District of Florida announced the arrest of 40-year-old Miguel Diaz Gonzalez. He has been charged with production of child pornography. Gonzalez, who is alleged to have operated online under the username “Satan’s child,” was reportedly in possession of a video wherein he is depicted raping an 8-year-old who had previously been in his care.
Gonzalez first became a person of interest when the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children was tipped off to potential illegality involving an online storage account tied to the username “Satan’s child.” Investigators examined the account and the contents associated with it, finding child sexual abuse material.
Authorities traced the account to Gonzalez’s Orlando home. Having executed a search warrant of the property, law enforcement agents determined Gonzalez was the user of the account in question. With the link established, they executed another warrant to search the account.
According to the Justice Department, officials found a video documenting Gonzalez’s rape of a child.
Gonzalez was arrested by the FBI on September 8. His booking report indicated that he had several tattoos depicting skulls and demons as well as one that read “F— the world.”
If convicted, Gonzalez faces a maximum sentence of 30 years.
The FBI, Orlando Police Department, Seminole County sheriff’s office, and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement were involved in the investigation.
This case is brought as part of Project Safe Childhood (PSC), a nationwide initiative to combat the technology-facilitated epidemic of child sexual exploitation. PSC was launched in May 2006 by the DOJ and works through a network of federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies to protect children and throw offenders behind bars.
According to the DOJ, technological advances have “encouraged child sexual exploitation offenders, especially those operating online, to an unprecedented degree.” The department noted that virtually every new technology made available to law-abiding citizens can be weaponized by degenerates against the innocent.
Encryption, IP-masking technologies, highly protected online communities, video-streaming services, and mobile devices, in the wrong hands, can help offenders elude law enforcement and continue victimizing children.
Assistant United States attorney Cortney Randall, who has been with the PSC for nearly 15 years, noted that victims can be targeted in a variety of ways. Whereas Gonzalez’s alleged victim was someone he knew personally, some offenders reach out to children via messaging apps and online games.
Randall told Fox46, “When you do come across something online or someone does try and contact your child please report it to law enforcement. … Even if your child is not a victim, that person is just going to go out and find a new victim.”
Even if offenders responsible for victimizing children are imprisoned, their criminal content may remain in circulation online for the consumption of other offenders. For this reason, the PSC has highlighted the importance of hunting down those who produce, distribute, and possess child pornography.
As parents across the nation wake up to the threat that the American educational system poses to children, many have taken note of the sexually explicit, politically motivated literature that has made its way into public and school libraries.
In Wyoming, community members notified the police department about explicit books in the local library’s youth section. “Sex is a Funny Word,” written by Cory Silverberg and illustrated by Fiona Smyth, is one such book. It was placed on the American Library Association Reading List for 2016. Intended for those as young as 7-year-old second graders, the book has been featured in middle school libraries and discusses the “subjects of transgender identity, intersex conditions, and masturbation.” It also erroneously claims that “having a penis isn’t what makes you a boy. Having a vulva isn’t what makes you a girl. The truth is much more interesting than that!”
This type of propagandizing has become standard for the left-wing extremists embedded in our education system. But what makes it all the more astonishing is both the thoroughly unnerving — and previously unreported — history of this book’s author and the institutional support that’s propelled him to notoriety.
From Sex Shops To School Libraries
Cory Silverberg’s website links to the four books he’s written. Each one focuses on the same thing: sex. With the exception of “The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability,” which he coauthored with Miriam Kaufman and Fran Odette, the author’s work is aimed at children. His latest book, “You Know, Sex,” another collaboration with Smyth, is available for pre-order and discusses “pornography,” “stigma,” and “gender.” He calls the book “essential for kids.” His website bio states, “Cory’s life is full of kids. All of them know where babies come from. Some know more.”
Who is this man so intent on informing your children not only about sex, but about pornography, transsexuality, and masturbation? On his website, which advertises children’s books, the author cites himself as a “founding member of Come As You Are Co-operative,” an anti-capitalist sex shop in Toronto, which he also links to.
As the Toronto Star noted years ago, this isn’t just any sex shop. This is a “beginner’s sex store.” The outlet noted that the store hoped “to hold an off-site sex-education workshop for parents of children aged 7 to 12, one that will focus on more than reproduction.” The Star went on to quote Silverberg as saying, “Our overall focus is pleasure-based rather than fear-based.”
The shop’s website includes a section that catalogs the owners’ media appearances. One edition of Fab magazine, published on February 7, 2007, includes an article titled “Come As You Are Celebrates 10 Years.” It spares no details, highlighting a “Japanese rope bondage” workshop, while also graphically describing a real life, in-person “workshop” that featured sexual demonstrations from two naked men.
The disturbing focus on children that is so clear on Silverberg’s personal website is just as apparent on the sex shop’s website. Right next to ads for the exact type of products you’d expect a sex shop to sell, is a “Kids, Parents, and Teens Books” section. The section boasts “sex positive guides for younger folk.”
The kid’s section carries books like “Gender Creative Child,” a guide to masturbation, and “Woke Parenting,” which seeks to help readers “raise your kids to be feminist, anti-racist,” and “gender-inclusive.” Silverberg’s own books are also featured on the site.
Involvement In Curriculum Development
The author’s involvement in Ante Up reveals a conscious desire to embed his distorted worldview into schools. The organization advertises “socio-emotional learning” curriculum that “focuses on supporting educators of color and working-class educators in unlearning the white supremacist ableist heteropatriarchal ways of writing and educating others.”
The sex shop co-founder is joined by such esteemeed co-collaborators as Clarissa Francis, who cut squarely into the Babyon Bee’s marketshare when her bio explained that she “developed the Let Freedom C.U.M. Sexuality Workshop Series to equip Black sexuality professionals, and the aspiring sexually liberated, to recognize and utilize multi-disciplinary approaches to discussing Pleasure Activism as a tool for Black Sexual Liberation.”
The organization seems to have courted favor with various political bodies in New York. Ante Up’s founder Bianca Laureano “wrote the sexual and reproductive justice discussion guide for the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene,” according to her bio. Silverberg spoke on “Sex Is a Funny Word” for the NYC Department of Education’s Office of Curriculum, Instruction, and Professional Learning.
Institutional Support of Extremism
It isn’t a fluke that a leftwing sex shop founder has been propped up as an authority on sexuality, with direct access to children. Media and education institutions, alongside several leftwing activists, have helped mainstream such fringe beliefs. The author is praised because of, not in spite of, the extremism of his sexual worldview.
That “Sex is a Funny Word” was lauded by Kristin Russo on behalf of BuzzFeed as “revolutionary” tells you everything you need to know, but the outlet was one of many institutions to lend its support.
The book won the American Library Association’s Stonewall Award and was celebrated by the School Library Journal, which called the book “exceptional” specifically because of “its introduction of the subjects of transgender identity, intersex conditions, and masturbation.” The organization publishes roughly 6,000 book reviews every year and bills itself as “the premiere publication for librarians and information specialists who work with children and teens.”
Lambda Literary, which “nurtures and advocates for LGBTQ writers,”heaped praise on the book, noting that it took “his radical approach to sex education” featured in his first book even further. It goes on to discuss the role that the book can have in cementing cultural shifts. During an interview with the organization, the author pointed out that some of his critics believe that he is “warping people’s ideas of gender.” He flatly responded, “Maybe I am.”
Various activists, each of whom is committed to overthrowing healthy conceptions of sex, lauded the book alongside these institutions in reviews posted on Amazon.
Andee Hochman is an accomplished leftwing activist who wrote a book all about upending traditional notions of family. It was named “one of the 100 most important feminist books of the 20th century by Sojourner magazine.” Hochman celebrated“Sex Is a Funny Word’s”“radical and urgent message – sexuality with a side of social justice,” also expressing glee that one of the children in the book was portrayed as non-binary. Her lone critique? The text was too small.
Transgender activist and author of “My New Gender Workbook” Kate Bornstein was similarly impressed, writing a review that proposed the book as a viable alternative to college, graduate school, and even “years of therapy.” This is high praise, especially from an activist who wrote the “Step by-Step Guide to Achieving World Peace Through Gender Anarchy and Sex Positivity.”
Aidan Key, who leads trainings in schools, remarked that the book enables readers to “step out of today’s binary gender paradigm,” while Slate’s Rachelle Hampton lauded the book because it “humorously tackles topics from gender to masturbation” and was “leaps and bounds ahead” of other books “in terms of how progressive it is.”
But Huffington Post outdid both Slate and BuzzFeed years ago when they offered the author a platform and even hosted a symposium on reshaping America’s sexual norms with him and more established leftwing activists. The author’s extreme views were given the patina of normalcy through the presence of more mainstream activists like notable author Esther Perel and the widely published Ian Kerner, who talk less of childhood masturbation and more of feminism and relationships. They were also joined by academic Leonore Tiefer, who was involved in the leadership of an organization intent on keeping perversity like “Sex is a Funny Word” in school libraries. Tiefer won an award named after Alfred Kinsey, a hero of the pro-pedophile group NAMBLA.
What’s so telling isn’t the book itself, but that the beliefs behind it, undoubtedly considered reprehensible by massive swaths of the world, have been intentionally mainstreamed by both an activist base and an institutionally backed political movement that’s hostile to traditional notions of decency. No wonder parents are getting active.
Cory Silverberg did not respond to a request for comment.
Spencer Lindquist is an intern at The Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com.
Craig Shubert, the mayor of Hudson, Ohio, orders all members of the Hudson City School District Board of Education to resign or face criminal charges for allowing a high school class to use a book asking students to write several sexually explicit writing prompts, Sept. 13, 2021. | Screenshot: Twitter/Jenny Beth Martin
The mayor of a city in Ohio ordered the school board to either resign or face criminal charges for allowing high school students to be exposed to course material that he described as “child pornography.”
At the Hudson City School District Board of Education meeting Monday, Hudson Mayor Craig Shubert, a Republican, addressed the school board, saying, “It has come to my attention that your educators are distributing essentially what is child pornography in the classroom. I have spoken to a judge this evening; she has already confirmed that.’
“I’m going to give you a simple choice: You either choose to resign from this board of education or you will be charged,” he added. The crowd gathered at the board meeting erupted into applause following Shubert’s speech.
BREAKING: Hudson mayor demands all school board members resign or face possible criminal charges over high school course material that he said a judge called "child pornography."
“I'm going to give you a simple choice: You either choose to resign or you will be charged." pic.twitter.com/guhp0zc0ns
The course material that raised concerns for Shubert and many parents and students who attended the school board meeting is called, 642 Things to Write About, one of several required texts for composition in the liberal arts II, a college-level English course offered at Hudson High School in conjunction with Hiram College.
Before Shubert spoke, a local resident shared his concerns about the book with the board. “Do not sexualize our kids,” he demanded. “The raw filth that snuck past the gatekeeping functions of this board of ed of 642 Reasons was disgusting.” The man listed one of the prompts students were asked to write about, including “explain a time when you wanted to orgasm but couldn’t.” He alleged that “students were told not to take the book home” so that their parents would not be aware of the material their children were exposed to at school.
Meredith Judson, a student at Hudson High School, recalled: “The first day we got it, within 10 minutes of us getting this book, all of us around the room had already found the things out” about the problematic prompts in the book. “If we found out in 10 minutes … that all of these prompts were in the book, it’s just interesting how … the teacher wouldn’t have known about this.”
Judson indicated exposure to sexually explicit material in the classroom was not an isolated incident. She described how in a previous class, she was “watching movies that were rated R that showed very sexual … scenes and very explicit content,” including “a child that was a 10 year old that was up on stage taking off her clothes to do a perverted dance.”
Monica Havens read aloud several additional prompts from the book. One prompt asking students to “Write a sex scene you wouldn’t show your mom” was followed up by a subsequent prompt asking students to “rewrite the sex scene from above into one that you’d let your mom read.”
According to Havens, 642 Things to Write About also asks students to “describe your favorite part of a man’s body using only verbs,” “write a sermon for a beloved preacher who has been caught in a sex scandal,” “write an X-rated Disney scenario,” “drink a beer” and “write about the taste,” discuss “the first time you had sex” and “write a scene that begins ‘It was the first time I killed a man.’”
“I hope each and every one of you is as uncomfortable as I am after reading that,” she remarked. “Now, imagine you are 17 and in a room full of peers with an adult teacher. How do you feel now?”
“This is what Hudson teachers are asking our children to write about. When these topics are encouraged and read by adults, that is pedophilia and this is happening on your watch.”
Accusing the school board of allowing “grooming” to take place, she told them that “all of you need to be replaced.” Noting that the book has been in schools for six years, she concluded that “you have allowed the sexualization of our youth and grooming material to be approved for classroom content.”
In response to Shubert’s call for him and his colleagues to step down, Hudson City Schools Board of Education President David Zuro issued a statement asserting that “While we respect the Mayor’s position … at this time, no board of education member has indicated any intention to resign.”
The terms of three of the five members of the board of education will expire on Dec. 31, while the other two members have two years left in their terms.
At Monday’s meeting, Board Vice President Steve DiMauro proclaimed that “the fact that our children were exposed to this, it needs to be addressed.” Superintendent of Schools Phil Herman maintained that an investigation into the matter was “underway.”
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